The NS&B students and faculty are depicting a giant neuron. “Sodium (Na+) enters the cell, the neuron fires, potassium (K+) leaks out, and the cell returns to its resting potential,” one student explains. Course co-director André Fenton of New York University (in black t-shirt at right) is opening and closing the cell membrane. The other course director, Hans Hofmann of University of Texas-Austin (leading the group in a white lab coat) is “a grounded electron. Totally harmless,” he says.

The Embryology course is enacting the life cycle of a worm (polychaete). “First we show fertilization, then larva formation, then termination, when the adult dies,” says course co-director and MBL Fellow Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado of Stowers Institute. (It’s not a sad ending; they repeat the cycle multiple times!)

The Neurobiology course, led by co-directors Graeme Davis of University of California-San Francisco and Tim Ryan of Cornell University, makes good use of a squirt-gun: they are also enacting a neuron firing!